The Last Pilgrims (11 page)

As the Pastor’s party rode south, the dust
from the road was so heavy and thick that everyone had bandanas or
balaclavas pulled over their mouths and noses.

They negotiated the county road at a pretty
fast pace, considering the heat and season. Still, on occasion,
they would have to detour, following wagon-rutted tracks behind
cattle barns, around catchment tanks, or through fields of golden
wheat. The locals knew where the county road had been blocked, cut,
or otherwise made to be impassible. None of the old paved roads
between the ranch and Bethany existed any longer.

Almost immediately after the collapse, the
paved roads had been blocked by trees and boulders, mostly by
locals seeking to stem, or at least slow, any bandit traffic.
Later, the pavement itself had been ripped up and used in dams and
other infrastructure projects. The plain people had no use for
paved roads, and saw them as a tangible evil—both a symptom and
cause of everything that had gone wrong with the old society.

“Paved roads allow you to move faster,”
Father had said. “Moving faster leads to the sins of covetousness,
impatience, over-specialization, and inevitably produces the
idolatry of efficiency and utilitarianism. Eventually, these sins
lead to the death of faith, family, and just about everything else.
Paved roads shrink the world, but increase the real distance
between parents and children, friends, and brethren. Everything you
should hate is brought near, but everything you should love and
cherish moves far away from you.” His father repeated this message
many times, and the current state of the world after the collapse
bore witness to his beliefs. “Everything man-made that shrinks the
world,” his father would say, “is, at some level, an assault on God
who made the world.”

Great minds must think alike, because he
couldn’t remember a paved road around here that was still intact.
Many years ago, when he was still a boy, his father had taken him,
and many of the men from the ranch, to the old city of Penateka,
two long days by wagon eastward from Bethany. Penateka used to be
the largest city in the area, and was a regular shopping
destination for most of the Vallenses prior to the collapse.

There was no city of Penateka, Texas any
more. David had seen pictures of the city in old newspapers that
his father kept, but within ten years of the collapse, the city was
gone. It hadn’t been destroyed by bombs or fire. No one would have
ever wasted an atomic bomb on the town. Nevertheless, in a decade,
the city had been disassembled by hand. Penateka was destroyed as a
result of covetousness and greed, but it had disappeared out of
necessity
. Piece by piece, the city, which had once been
home to almost 30,000 souls, had been torn down and hauled off in
wagons and carts by people who needed the materials for homes,
barns, caskets, fires, or… whatever.

A decade ago, there were still some passable
roads in Penateka. There were no street signs or telephone poles,
or abandoned buildings. There were many abandoned cars, or rather,
frames of abandoned cars, but there were no houses, fences or
gates. In many places, even the sewer and water pipes had been
ripped out of the ground.

David vividly remembered seeing a chunk of
concrete jutting out of the ground, where someone had tried to drag
it off by chaining horses or a team of oxen to it, but they
obviously had given up. The chunk was probably too large or maybe
the chain had broken. Father had said that it was a chunk of street
curbing, but that it represented the old world. Around seven
billion people had tried to drag it someplace God didn’t want it to
go… so the chain broke.
And the meek had inherited the
earth
. Well, the meek, along with a whole lot of covetous,
militaristic scumbags like the King of Aztlan—who wanted to destroy
the meek and steal the earth. Despite his militant tendencies,
David resolutely believed that God had a plan for everyone,
including the King of Aztlan and those like him.

In every era of time, he thought, God had
raised up a champion to defend His people and destroy His foes.
Moses, Joshua, David. Now, the Vallenses had a champion in Phillip
and the Ghost militia, even if Father couldn’t see it.

On their way to Bethany the group stopped
from time to time and he and his father would ride up to houses,
barns or fields to inform the local Vallenses of what was
happening. Father told them to pack up whatever food and supplies
they could muster into wagons and head up to the Wall ranch. Many
wouldn’t leave immediately because they were concerned about their
animals, but they dutifully promised their pastor that they would
get prepared and would come quickly whenever they determined that
trouble was near. Some of the more creative ones had already
devised a system during the construction and arrangement of their
farms whereby they could leave their animals unattended for days,
even weeks, and the animals could feed and water themselves.

David knew that an exodus would soon begin
and the road the men had just traveled would be jammed with horses,
buggies and wagons heading northward. It was very likely that some
of these people might never see their farms again. Father would
say, “Fields can be replanted. Farms can be rebuilt. We have
resources and man-power, but we cannot replace our lives.”

David honored and respected his father, but
he could not see how teaching his own people not to defend
themselves, especially in such an extreme situation, could in any
way be protecting their lives. The son had concluded that
inordinate pacifism—pacifism in the face of inescapable aggression
and annihilation—actually bred violence. All that he could think of
was—
we need to fight!

The road began to rise as they approached
the Bethany pass. The town was now situated only on this side of
the pass, but before the collapse, another, smaller town had
existed on the south side of the ‘mountains’ (as the locals had
called them). The mountains were actually twin mesas that rose up
about 300 feet above Bethany. The pass between the mesas was 100
yards wide but was made narrower by thickly growing mesquite and
brush, along with large piles of rubble and boulders on both sides
of the road.

At one time, just after the Civil War, the
southward path through the mesas had been a military road along
which the Apache and Comanche tribes had been driven northward out
of Texas. Before the collapse, the road had become a small and
lightly traveled state highway. Now, the pass was a narrow wagon
path between the twin mesas of Bethany.

After the collapse, wiser minds among the
Vallenses had determined to build a new trading village north of
the mesas. In this way, in case of an attack, the pass could be
shut down or blocked in order to give the town folk time to
evacuate the village.

The town could still, albeit with some
difficulty, be approached from the west. However, crossing
Jefford’s Creek was no easy endeavor, making the western route far
less appealing. Jefford’s Creek had once, indeed, been a creek,
rather than the river it was now. Father told him that it had been
dammed up by the WPA back in what they called ‘The Great
Depression’, and that Jefford’s Creek Reservoir 30 miles to the
west was once the water supply for most of the towns in the area.
Once the dam was completed in the early 1940s, the creek had become
nothing more than a seasonal overflow from the reservoir. Back
then, it was only fed by the draws, run-offs, and creeks from there
to here. By the early 21
^st
century, it was at best a
wide creek, but sometimes it was just a trickling stream.

The reservoir had been gone now for almost
twenty years, and there weren’t many people diverting water for
agriculture anymore. For all intents and purposes, Jefford’s Creek
had become a river again as it had been throughout most of history.
From just west of Bethany, the river flowed serenely through the
lowlands and valleys for awhile northward before making a giant
bend only a few miles north and east of the Wall Ranch. From there,
it flowed into Lake Penateka, a day’s ride to the east-northeast of
the ranch. Lake Penateka was one of the only man-made reservoirs in
the area that still held water.

From the east, Bethany was virtually
inapproachable north of the twin mesas. The mesquite brush, juniper
bushes, and sharply undulating terrain made it almost impossible to
traverse on horseback, or en masse, especially by anyone who didn’t
know the area. The militiamen knew of paths and switchbacks, and
they could, and did, successfully send outriders and recon units
through the brush they referred to as ‘The Big Thicket’. Given that
for any army, that approach was not practicable, the Aztlani
troops—if they planned to destroy Bethany, which undoubtedly they
did—would have to come through the narrow Bethany pass. Five
hundred men was a formidable force, but David was of the opinion
that Bethany could and should be defended.

If Phillip were here, he thought, there
would certainly be a fight, and perhaps, with God’s help, the
resistance could even ruin the Duke’s plans. However, with the
heart and soul of the Ghost militia away—and likely ignorant of the
pending attack—and only a handful of the militia present, it was
very unlikely that any attempt would be made to defend and protect
Bethany. It would all burn.

There was going to be a debate in the
council. That much was sure. A relatively large number of the
Vallenses believed that the time to fight had arrived. If only he
would be allowed to speak maybe he could convince his father and
the Elders to let each man act according to their consciences.

If he would be allowed to speak
.

That was in no wise a certain thing. He was
not old enough to speak freely during a debate because you had to
be 30 years old to serve as an Elder; besides, his feelings were
well known among the Vallenses. The division and disagreement that
had come from his last speech in front of the Elders and the
council had still not been resolved. The issue was boiling just
under the surface. Now, it seemed to be coming to a head.

As they approached Bethany, David looked up
and saw his father’s eyes intently peering at him over a green-dyed
cotton bandana. The eyes were the softest brown, flecked with gold,
platinum and bronze; they had always struck him as being almost
uniquely alive.

As a boy, he had heard his father preach
about the deadness of the world and of the carnal man, speaking of
deadness in the eyes of ‘worldlings’. He used to say, “Those who
are fully given over to the world and to their love of it have the
eyes of the shark. They have doll’s eyes. There is a deep and
pervading deadness in them like inky pools of hopelessness.” His
father was not talking about any particular eye color. He was
talking about a lack of life behind those eyes. In contrast, David
had always—from his earliest memories—noted a particular and
sparkling glow of life in the eyes of his father; and it was this
life that was looking at him now. He could not see if his father
was smiling or frowning, but he knew that he was studying him. His
father’s lively eyes missed nothing.

The group rode into the town and agreed to
meet at the Public House in half an hour. His father sent
messengers throughout the village, alerting the inhabitants of the
imminent danger, urging them to pack up and head northward as soon
as possible. Two militia men were sent to find and alert the Ghost
units that were supposed to be in the area.

David dismounted in front of the Cobbler
Shop and unlashed a large Longhorn hide from behind his saddle. Ana
the Tanner had asked him to deliver the hide to Mr. Byler the
Cobbler in exchange for some boots for herself and the Wall family.
If things were coming down for good in Bethany, the Walls would
need those extra boots.

The first cool breeze flowing from the
distant squall line pushed through town, as David removed his straw
hat and entered the cobbler shop. The old cobbler stood up slowly
from his work and approached the large oak counter to meet him.

Mr. Byler was probably only in his 70s, but
as an
oldling
he was quite rare. To the ‘younglings’—those
who had been born just before or immediately after the crash—anyone
who had been a full adult at the time of the collapse was called an
‘oldling’.

Because of the nature of the crash, there
were a few peculiar demographical anomalies in the world, or at
least in the world that David knew. Human society was now
stratified very clearly between oldlings and younglings, even if
only the young folk used those terms. There was a noticeable lack
of any substantial intermediate generation (the
middlings
),
as well as an absence of many people who were very old. Basically,
there was a
stratum
or age group which was mostly
missing.

The missing generation consisted of those
aged 18 to 35. Very few people in that age group had survived—David
himself was one of them, and so was his sister Betsy—maybe only a
few hundred of them existed among all of the Vallenses.

Many of those who were small children or
babies at the time of the crash had died not too long after. It was
a tough time, and high infant and youth mortality rates arrived
with the perils of the times. Among the Vallenses, this loss was
stayed within a few years, as relative stability returned to the
Vallensian region, but the noticeable lack of many
twenty-somethings was a reality of David’s world.

Likewise, it was pretty rare to find
oldlings who were much more than about 65 years of age, as so many
of what were then known as ‘senior citizens’ had also died. Thus,
Mr. Byler was quite a rarity. He was one of the oldest of the
Vallenses living in the area. He had served his time as an elder,
and though he still offered his council and advice freely, he no
longer attended council meetings. He found them to be tiring
affairs.